“Nonsense.”
“I protest. In the first place, I’m not being flippant. I’m quite sincere. In the second place, you’ll find there are two ways to cope with the madness in this godforsaken Hades. The first is to pretend that it’s all a great—if rather unsporting—outdoor game. A match of cricket prolonged by inclement weather and unlucky batsmen.”
“And the second?”
“I’d rather not say.”
Another truck came by, identical to the first. A supply convoy, probably, returning from the lines. I rubbed my thumbs against the wheel. My back ached, my jaw ached. Every muscle strung tight.
“In any case,” Captain Fitzwilliam went on, when the clamor died away, “we have roamed far from the question at hand. What exactly are you running away from, Miss Fortescue? I find I should very much like to know.”
“Nothing at all.”
“Tyrant parents? Failed love affair? Creditors at your heels?”
“None of those things.”
“Nothing left behind? No heartache, no loved ones pining?”
I gripped the wheel and leaned forward. Stared through the windshield. The bleak, brown, lurching winter landscape. I remember I was considering how long to remain silent before starting another topic, and what kind of topic I could safely introduce. Weather or war news or staff incompetence. Something even more impersonal, like the quality of wartime coffee, and whether you could call it coffee at all. Then—
“I have a sister.”
“What’s that?”
“A sister!”
“Older or younger?”
“Younger.”
“Are you close?”
“Very much.”
“Well, then. Why the devil should you leave her behind, if you love her?”
“Because I—”
Well. I stopped right there, right there on the edge, right in the split second before I tumbled off. Shocked that I had crept so close without realizing. Or shocked, really, that I had allowed this man to lead me there. Why? Because he was handsome and weary and crammed with easy manners, because he was solid and smoke-scented by my side, because I was breathing the fog of his breath and he was breathing mine, and his big left knee connected with my slender right one. Because he was a doctor, after all, and how could you not trust a doctor with your miseries? That was why doctors existed.
“Because I wanted to help,” I said instead.
He shifted in his seat, and his knee left mine.
“Well,” he said, tilting his head back again, crossing his arms across his ribs, “if you change your mind, I should be glad to serve as your confidant.”
I didn’t reply. I didn’t think I could. I felt sick, perspiring, the way you do when you stand by yourself on the brink of some vertiginous cliff, and the whole world undulates around you, and you’re overcome by the tantalizing power of suicide. The death that lies within your immediate grasp. A single, easy step.
When the silence ripened, and the road flattened, and I felt I could risk a sidelong glance, I saw that Captain Fitzwilliam’s eyes were closed once more.
But I knew he was not asleep.
When we wallowed into the stable-yard entrance at half past ten, the scene had changed from the day before. Two ambulances occupied the corner nearest the barn, and for a moment I couldn’t tell if they were loading patients or unloading them. I pulled the brake and the car lurched and stopped. “We’re here!” I shouted, banging a fist on the wood behind me, and I didn’t wait for Captain Fitzwilliam to stir, I didn’t wait for Corporal Pritchard to wake up and crawl from his stretcher. I jumped out of my seat and into the soft earth, and I floundered around back to toss open the door.
Pritchard was sitting on the floor, dazed and sleepy. He lifted his head and swore. “That was quick.”
I stuck out my hand and lifted him free. The other ambulances, I now saw, were loading men. They were headed for the railway station, for the sanitary trains to the base hospitals. From the east came the sound of artillery, a steady barrage, round after round firing into the German defenses. This time there was no returning fire, no long whistle and low, shattering explosion, but I stuck my head to the crown of my helmet anyway, as if that would protect me, and staggered through the sucking mud back to the front of the ambulance.
Just as I ducked around the corner, a stretcher party charged from the doorway, awash in wet khaki and as urgent and muscular as a set of racehorses. I stopped just in time and flattened myself against the wall. “Watch it, mate!” the orderly said, the one in front, and for some reason this rebuke brought me back from the nauseous precipice. Reminded me, I suppose, of my own unimportance in this place. My insignificance. I was not absolutely essential; I was intruding. I was in the way. There was no impending collision. No Virginia at the center of some fearful, imagined impact. Just wounded men, who were fighting a war.
The stretcher passed. “Go on, then,” said Fitzwilliam’s voice behind me, and I obeyed him. Crossed the threshold into the barn.
Less crowded now. A few of the cots lay stripped and empty, and the orderlies and nursing sisters moved around like people instead of rabbits. But the architecture was the same, the brown walls, the rows of lumpy beds to the right, the curiously identical white faces stuck above each blanket, the curtains to the left that partitioned the operating theater, the recovery room, the mess and the barracks. The smell of disinfectant, of earth and wet wool and old wood, enclosed me in its familiar cloud. If I cared to listen, I could discern the restless moans, the low chatter of a hundred injured men. Like any hospital, I thought. Captain Fitzwilliam pushed past me and caught the elbow of one of the nurses, speaking earnestly, head a little bowed, so that the electric light caught the tender skin of the back of his neck, and I found that I was wrong. That the threat of annihilation didn’t matter.
But that’s how it happens, when you have no defense, no immunity whatsoever. When you thought you were strong, and you were only untested. I made a movement, preparing to turn away, and at that instant Fitzwilliam lifted his gray-speckled head and looked at me, and his lips parted.
“Miss Fortescue—”
A clatter of boots overtook him, a choir of exhausted male shouts, and our heads snapped to the doorway of the barn, where a new stretcher party had arrived, flinging mud and chill onto the floorboards.